


Sunrise

by d__T



Series: And in the End, It's All the Same [3]
Category: Mad Max 1979
Genre: Walkabout, homegoing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-25 21:56:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4978018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/d__T/pseuds/d__T
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Renholder makes a stop at her mother's house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunrise

For two weeks, she heads north and east, moving slowly and chasing history. She stops frequently, sometimes staying several days if her hosts are amenable. The opportunity to wash her clothes is not to be slighted. And then she runs south on a whim, 300 miles in a night so she can watch dawn break from the far fields of her mother’s ranch.

Elise is astonished to find her daughter, five years gone but not missing, making breakfast for two just after the crack of dawn. After the shock wears off and the dropped glass of water is cleaned up, they sit down to eat together for the first time in eight long years and from both of them it is forgiveness and apology both for many many things. It doesn't need to be spoken, even after all this time apart because they both look healthy and strong, a light in their eyes that had been long missing.

Instead, Renholder tells her ma  ~~tall~~  tales of her time on the road, of the dark time when she at some roadkill and got terribly sick, of the time she found both a tribe and their spirits living together where the line between reality and The Dreaming had faded, of the time she’d dragged a giant child of a bronze out into the scrub and bade him truly look at the sky and how he’d caught friendly shit from his fellows when she’d brought him back for “fraternizing with questionable civilians”.

The dark skin around her eyes crinkles with smiles the same way her daughter’s does. Elise trades stories about how the chickens laid a double egg one year and it hatched a double chicken, how the pigs won’t root around the tree where  _he_  is buried, how the garden is flourishing and  _have you seen this new breed of tomatoes?_

Excitement uncontained, Renholder follows her mom out to the garden and by the dreaming gods, those are some fantastic looking tomatoes. Yellow and golden with purple shoulders, Elise plucks one and brings it inside, immediately serving it sliced with a bit of soft cheese and black pepper. It tastes as good as it looks.

She spends a week there, and washes the dirt out of the creases of her skin, patches her clothes- even the leather thighs on her riding pants had begun to show wear -and helps out on the ranch. It’s peaceful, delightful, but soon enough she gets the urge to pick up again and there’s no use denying it.

Elise understands  _walkabout_  and hides a bag of tomatoes and extra jerky in Renholder’s saddlebags. She asks not about the revolver in it’s holster, or the spiked bat secured across the handlebars. She knows enough already.

That morning, the last dawn break witnessed from the ranch house roof, Elise pulls her taller daughter down to kiss her forehead before she rides into the cool morning. First south, she rolls through her old haunts without slowing down for the demons, and then west, she knows a town with a man who listened when she told him to look at the sky.


End file.
